Neos core team workshop - the meaning of it all

The Neos Project Neos Team
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During our Post Conference Sprint in Karlsruhe we opted for a brainstorming based Neos team workshop instead of our usual in person retrospective.

The discussions quickly focused on these topics:

Team member activity and communication

  • Team meetings: They did have less and less attendance in the past and the last summary on discuss was posted in 2023.
    • Are our time slots still good suited for us?
    • Why did we stop documenting our meetings? People who can’t attend relied on those documentations to keep in touch with whats happening
    • We have 4 regular meetings during the week (Tuesday team meeting, Wednesday team meeting, Wednesday Marketing weekly, Friday Neos 9 weekly)
      • The friday weekly has a good structure and regular attendance. Let’s keep this up :sparkling_heart:
    • :bulb: Idea: Ask our team members about new time slots
    • :bulb: Idea: monthly blog post and/or newsletter about “what happened in the project” (our marketing team has this already on their task list)
  • Team activity:
    • It’s sometimes unclear, especially for decision-making, who is active at the moment or who is currently unavailable but will be active again in the foreseeable future.
    • We want to show, that beeing a Neos team member doesn’t have to be associated with coding. Therefore, we might want to add roles / tasks or interests regarding the Neos project to our team page.
    • :bulb: Idea: Regular quarterly team meetings in a larger group.
    • :bulb: Idea: Create an semi-annual opt-in poll to determine who is currently active
    • :bulb: Idea: Show inactive members in a dedicated section on neos.io

Appreciation of our contributors

  • We want to continue naming of contributors in releases. Major, minor and bugfix releases.
  • There are people who contribute regularly and don’t want to be part of the team - how do we honour that?
    • :bulb: Idea: Create a concept for “Core Contributors”
  • We need to continuously highlight, that contribution is not only about coding.
    For example, the Neos team itself does not only consist of developers.

Action Items

  • Create a regular Opt-In activity poll for Neos Team members (@ahaeslich, @christianm, @sebobo)
    • half-yearly regular poll
  • Concept for “Core Contributors” (@KallertPa, @daniellienert, @ahaeslich)
    • What is the difference to the Neos Team?
    • Which rights e.g. in github (or other tools) would be needed to enable people?
  • Create a poll to figure out new time slot(s) for our team meetings (@lubitz)
  • Refactor the team page on neos.io (@sebobo, @sregniet)
  • Look into options for a centralised rights management (@robert)
  • Proposal for team member and/or contributor help icon (@bwaidelich)

Follow ups

As we had limited time to discuss everything in detail, some topics we will need to address in further dedicated meetings:

  • Do we have a clear overview in the Neos Team which tasks we have to take on? Are there any blank spots we need to address and/or can we enable people to help us with?
  • We might want to reconsider what the structure and goal of our team meeting is. Maybe its not as clear at the moment as it should be?
3 Likes
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Action Item - Opt-In activity poll

Introduction

TODO: add introduction

Questions

1. Name

2. Do you still see yourself as an active core team member?

TODO: add description text

Answer selection:

  • Yes, I’m actively contributing with the capacity I have.
  • Yes, but I’m struggling with my contribution. Please let us know details below.
  • No currently not. Please mark me as temporarily inactive.
  • No, but I see myself rather as an active Core Contributor.
  • No, please remove me from the team.

3. What would make it easier for you to contribute to the team?

4. We want restructure the team page on neos.io. Therefore, we would like to know: What the three main topics that you contribute to the Neos project and its community?

5. Is there anything else you want to tell us about?

2 Likes
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I mostly stopped attending weeklies, there are often long discussion on specific issues, lots of insider stuff, and it felt more productive to do other things with that time. For me currently deep work on where the role of LLMs in CMS will be.

I never found the meeting summaries very helpful. I would find it extremely helpful to have an (ai-based) summary with jump markers and a video recording. That way, I could see the 10% of the meeting that is really interesting to me (e.g. discussion of a specific bug I care about, or some UI topic), and maintaining a rough overview of what’s happening in the teams (the 90%).

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@rolandschuetz thx for your insights.

Yes this is exactly the discussion we touched as the meeting ended. And I myself can‘t shake the feeling that more of us might actualy see it that way.

We had a similar problem in fridays weekly and evolved it‘s structure to a general and a deep dive section.

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What’s the status of the action items? Any updates?

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I was struggeling, if it make sence to figure out a new time slot now. As mostly the feedback afterwards was more an issue of the meeting itself (content, participants, etc) and not about the timeslot.

I had the feeling we need to determine the purpose of the team meeting (social?, alignment?, progess?, …) before we try to find a proper timeslot, which might be different for different purposes.